I am a maker of pretty things mostly. They bring me joy and brighten the day. After having searched in myself for some pretty idea, I usually feel better in any situation.

Sometimes, though, there is only ugliness and pain. Or it seems this way, which, in any case, means I am stuck and not creating. Yet at the same time I know that creating sets my pained self free.

One time last year I had hit a very hard crisis with my sweetie. I was ready to let our relationship go, because of all the pain and stuck. Needless to say the ugliness blocked my creative outlet. Fortunately I had a chance to be on a call with the lovely Melissa Dinwiddie that week and she encouraged me to just play with things I don’t usually play and see what happens.

You can see what happened at the top of this post. It is crocheted, wired, paper macheed, feathered and painted. All from things I had in the house. It is kind of ugly but it is free. And it took the weight from me and let me breathe more easily again. I figured out that I do fine on my own, that I do not depend on a romantic relationship and that I enjoy being on my own.

In the end my sweetie and I got back together, we are tighter than ever and have a relationship that I am happy to be a part of. Because I learned to be loved enough in myself, to not depend on approval from him, I get to chose to be with him each day anew. All because I played with something new and gave the ugly legitimacy.

Actually just for yarn fish.

I was sorting through my stash and this little bag of blue and green leftovers fell into my hands. It contained a thick turquoise single, a bit of leftover Dailily and random bits of merino yarn in blues.

And then the yarn told me it wanted to be a fish. And not just any fish, a carp.

I’ve known yarn to have an opinion on what it becomes. Most often this is very subtle a project not going forward because it was the wrong one for the yarn, or an excited “OMG! I need to start this NOW!!!” But never has yarn had such a strange opinion.

But I’ve made it a habit not to argue with my yarn and I do think the finished carp is quite lovely. It took only a few hours on 6mm needles.

So, does your yarn talk to you? And what sort of things does it say?

I know I said I don’t like sewing as much as knitting, but lately it has been quite satisfying. For the coming summer, and my sweetie’s grandparent’s 50th wedding anniversary I made a skirt. I mostly followed Meream’s tutorial, adding a casing for the elastic at the top, rather than using the skirt-top for this. I also made an underskirt, for added opacity under the white flower fabric. Ironing the seams was a bit of a bore, but sewing progressed quite nicely and the finished product looks really well on me.

Specifically a quilt.

Considering I don’t actually sew all that much I have a sizable fabric stash. In volume it comes to about a third of my knitting stash, with some of the fabrics residing there for at least 10 years.

There was a time that I spent a lot of crafting time with the sewing machine, but that was before knitting had taken up place in my repertoire. I was never as good at sewing as I was at knitting, for a simple reason: I didn’t take the time to do it properly. I didn’t iron my fabrics or seams. I didn’t pin or baste them and I kind of just improvised. My reasoning was that I wanted to get to do the real thing, the one I wanted to do, which was sewing. Sewing involves much preparation and not so much sewing.

With knitting it seems you get to start right away. Obviously this isn’t true either, because to get a well fitting product you need to swatch and measure and calculate and in the end you need to sew parts together and block and over all knitting, as a process, has many parts. Just knitting contains a lot more knitting than sewing contains sewing.

To be clear, improvisation isn’t a bad thing the thing I am showing you today is improvised as well, but I did it properly, with ironing and seaming and pinning things. It still contains lots of mistakes, due to me not having a clue about the actual quilting part, but as a first (only?) try it is good enough.

I pieced together in a log cabing style pieces of fabric from my stash. I stuck with similar colors next to each other and chose to allow large pieces for ease of gaining size. Finishing the top and bottom was easy and I forwent inserting batting. I struggled with the quilting, where you sew top and bottom together. How close together do the lines have to be, and how do you sew straight across such a big expanse? In the end the quilting is kind of haphazard. Next time I would get myself actual instructions and maybe a class with someone knowledgeable.

All in all I am really happy, I’ve finally done this and I’ll wrap myself up in it all summer.

During the Yoga Teacher Training weekend last month a fellow student gave me a handful of orange fibre, because I looked sad to her. I was in fact pretty relaxed, but you know projection and such. Anyway, I was surprised and happy. Yay for soft and bright things that have so much potential.

While integrating the weekend on the following Monday, I span the fibre into a light fingering three ply. Spun on a 40g spindle and then Navajo plied. Of course I also took the chance to show of my archaic skills at the next YTT session. Everyone was duly impressed. Now I’m not just the weird Internet woman, but the weird Internet woman that cultivates archaic skills.

Lately I haven’t felt too much inclination to knit. Well, it’s more of a disinclination to knit things that I have already started. I have no problem in pairing of yarns and patterns and casting on, though I don’t put in more than a few hours on a given thing.

But I do other things instead, like gardening. I have basil, thai basil, sage, rosemary, lemon thyme, oregano, mint, a clematis and two succulents. I adore the fresh herbs I get from my balcony. Especially putting my lemon thyme onto strawberries with olive oil. It’s good, try it!

As reported I attended the Backnanger Wollfest this weekend. The class was wonderful. I had excellent students and they felt like they had an excellent teacher. Happiness all around. This was my first teaching experience outside a university, or BarCamp, context. I had no restrictions on what to teach and the students were paying their own hard earned money. Even more so than at University the students were customers that I needed to entertain. I also needed to balance the entertaining of the students with teaching them something that was actually useful. Fortunately I have a tendency to over prepare and it worked out well.

Of course I also attended the Wollfest as a participant. On Friday I had went to shop a little bit of yarn and a spindle. I also attended a lovely lecture on the historical and mythological significance of the spindle. Basically the spindle is a symbol for life, the womb and everything. It was also a necessary and ubiquitous tool for civilization until the middle of the 17th century when it got replaced by the spinning wheel as we know it today. It renewed my fervor of bettering myself at spinning yarn on my hand spindle. Consequently I spent the rest of the weekend learning to spin on my new turkish spindle.

These are my acquisitions on the yarn/fiber front, two skeins of sparkly yarn and two braids of fiber: